Description: Umi stands 5'3" tall and has a rather small frame, though more inclined to be thought of as lithe than frail; her graceful and precise movements suggest that she is decidedly not incapable of defending herself. Being a Cross, Umi has traits of both Jackals and Coyotes. Her fur is a mix of black, brown and dark blue with some gray patches. She wears a mask that conceals ritual scars that run in straight, thin lines from between her eyes around either side and over the top of her head, meeting in the back.

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Strength: 32 Always a small woman, Umi uses strategy to win her battles, and if there is an obstacle requiring strength to overcome, she finds a way around it.

Endurance: 39 Don't get hit, don't get spotted, and finish a fight quickly.

Intellect: 68 Umi lacks much of a formal education, in fact she could barely read until she was fourteen, but she has always had to think, learn, and plan quickly and under pressure.

Willpower: 61 Having survived the trials of being all but abandoned by society, Umi has built up a strong will to survive. She also has been trained to resist yielding to torture.

Personability: 49 While her preferred method is to slip a blade between a target's ribs without being seen, the ability to put someone off guard with words or being scary, as well as to tell a lie believable enough that it gives an opportunity to escape, is not to be underestimated.

Aptitude: 37 Other than a general knowledge of how magic works, she has no practice in using it herself.

Reflexes: 90 Being fast, quiet, and precise has been how Umi has survived and she knew it long before she became an assassin, so she has honed these traits to near perfection.

Umi was born to a Jackal woman who had some covert fun with one of her Coyote servants, and despite not being in season, fruit was born of their union. As punishment for her carelessness and in exchange for their help in keeping the whole thing under wraps, her family had her carry and bear, if not keep, the child. Keeping the Cross was out of the question so Umi was abandoned and would have died were it not for a derelict Fox who kept her and raised her as something of an adopted daughter, but more as a partner in thievery. He taught her how to steal without being seen, unwittingly laying the foundation for her eventual "graduation" in illicit activities.

Around the time of her thirteenth birthday, the authorities caught up to them, and the Fox chose to abandon her. When she realized he would sooner save his own skin than at least try to save both of them, Umi was so furious that she killed him. The apprehending soldier, however, was impressed by both her willingness to kill and her skill at acting without being detected (despite the failure that led to this incident) in a youth her age. Combined with the fact that no one would miss an orphaned Cross, instead of turning her over to the watch, he gave her to the Jackal family to which he had ties.

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Things eventually went too far, though, and as the families stepped up their attacks on each other, soon neither side had enough living members to hold together, and their bonds dissolved.

Umi is now on her own in the world, and she stays in the shadows, stealing what she needs to survive and occasionally taking up a job as a hit woman on an impromptu basis rather than any formal deal (i.e., "I'll kill this guy trashing your place if I get a free meal and some coin for my trouble.").

Umi is calm, patient, and observant, keeping most of her thoughts and opinions to herself. When she speaks, she is blunt and to the point, and she never says anything she does not mean. Even when practicing her trade of killing, she shows little if any regret or anger.

As stoic as she is, Umi is not as heartless as she tries to be. She has a soft spot for people, especially children, living in conditions similar to those in which she did: poverty. She also hates cowardice, and while being an assassin means coming after her targets in everything but an upfront attack, to run from one's troubles altogether (or worse, to sell out one's allies to save oneself) will earn her quiet but deadly wrath. As such, she is more easily persuaded to take (or offer) jobs wherein the result is beneficial to the destitute or quite the opposite to the cowardly.

Umi still does not know who her birth parents are, or even which one was which race, but from the time she has spent observing Jackals, she is quite certain that her Jackal parent either gave her up or forced her Coyote parent to do the same. While she has not tried to seek either of them out, sooner or later she is going to hunt them down and pay them a visit...and depending on how the visits go, she may decide to exact some long-nurtured revenge.

Whether ironic or appropriate, her life of outsider status has given her a strange feeling of kinship with Yan, who also had a hard life as a child, and even after starting a better life with his own people, is still nonetheless different for his childhood of slavery. Still, she feels she remains the one worse off, as Yan has at least found a place he loves, not to mention her outsider status stems even farther back than the circumstances of her birth: her race, which is not only nothing she can change but is plain for everyone to see.

While she tries not to let it bother her, Umi regards Koro as a rival, as despite the differences in what they hunt and how, they are both their society's predators. Despite this, were they to cooperate, they would find each other to be excellent partners, as there are enough similarities between their professions that they could learn to anticipate each other's maneuvers and coordinate their efforts extremely well. She has her own nickname for him: Dull Stone.

The scars on her head were deliberately inflicted on her as a mark of ownership. They were made with the aid of Healing magic that, instead of supporting the laws of the body, breaks them in that the scars will not heal naturally and cannot be healed with magic unless the caster is more powerful than the caster who inflicted the scars. In Umi's case, this would require someone of nearly Adept-level ability.

Since Umi does not know her birthday, she gives her birthday as the first day of the year.